Philosophical? No

Michael Lewis's description (Letters, April 18) of those who oppose Derrida, Lacan et al as "imbecilic", "conservative" and "bigoted" is standard and can be ignored. I cannot, however, let Jon E Wilson (Letters, April 20) get away with implying that opposition to some French thinkers implies dismissing all French thinkers or, by extension, all continental philosophers.

Readers of my philosophical writing will know that I have been hugely, and explicitly, influenced by Edmund Husserl (a paradigm continental philosopher) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (who is French). My book on Heidegger (another continental philosopher) acknowledges him and Wittgenstein as the most important philosophers of the 20th century. Raymond Tallis Stockport